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Interview: Director David Lowery – Ain’t Them Bodies Saints

David Lowery sat down with me to talk about his newest film, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, that showcases great performances from Academy Award Nominees Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck, as well as a dazzling performance from Ben Foster. Lowery talked about his film, sharing a name with a musician, effort, and finding funding for independent films.

I notice your Twitter bio [@davidlowery] says “not the one who sings”.

David Lowery: [laughs]

Do you get comments like “Hey, I love your music.”?

DL: I get that. I got one guy who’s a huge fan that e-mailed and invite me on a white water rafting tour in Colorado. I told him I wasn’t him and he said, “Do you want to come too? I’m sure it would be fun.” [laughs]. That’s why I had to add that to my bio. So many people were posting things on Twitter thinking that was me. I was lucky enough to get my name first. He’s on Twitter now too with a middle initial.

Your film, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, is beautifully shot. How did you approach shooting this film?

DL: One of the reasons I wanted to set the film in Texas is because I love the landscape. I love the idea of telling a small intimate story set against the epic background of Texas. There’s five or six characters in the movie and it’s a narrow focus. Whenever you take something small and set it against a landscape, suddenly it has an epic feel to it. Texas has no shortage of wonderful landscapes.

How did you come up with the story?

DL: I wanted to do something I had never done before and in my attempt to do that, I ended up doing something I had done before. That always seems to be the case. I made a very small movie, my first feature called St. Nick, which was about two runaway children. It was almost an entirely silent movie and it was very slow. I thought maybe I should do an action movie. I started with the idea of a good action movie would open with a really intense jail break sequence. I was going to do a movie about a guy breaking out of jail. I sat down to write it and couldn’t think of a good way for him to break out of jail, so I thought I’d come back to it. I started with him walking out of the woods after escaping and never came back to the jail break. Very quickly, my intentions of writing an action movie fell by the wayside and it became this other thing – a riff on a classic American outlaw story. It was a genre of film and a genre of song. I love old folk songs and also old American murder ballads. It’s a vein of storytelling I wanted to explore and play around with. I thought it would be fun to do something that had a great deal of familiarity to it. You watch this movie and it’s not a movie where anything surprises you, but by telling a story that’s so familiar you take a side route from Point A to Point B. That’s what I enjoy doing as a storyteller.

We essentially watch the same story types in different forms. When the film is beautifully shot and done well, it doesn’t matter that you’ve seen it before.

DL: Exactly. Within 20 or 30 minutes you forget that you’ve seen it before and it feels like a new experience. Any great movie can be traced back to another story. Every story has been told before, yet you go see new movies and it feels like a new experience. I’m inspired by all sorts of movies, books, and music. When I got make a film I take all those experiences, and hopefully absorbing them without ripping anything off. I regurgitate it through my perspective and hopefully that perspective has some uniquely to it. I hope that allows the experience of watching the movie to feel fresh.

Hearing you say that reminds me of the scene when Patrick leaves and comes back in to talk to Ruth. We’ve seen it a million times in cinema, but the way he tells her, how he phrases it, and what he doesn’t say is what’s unique. That’s what keeps you engaged in the story.

DL: That was my intention. When I was writing, I would get to a point and say, ‘You know he’s going to say something, but what is he going to say? What would I say in that moment? As a real person, what would I say?’ I always try to satisfy that aspect of the story. If it came down to whether Skerritt was going to do something to Patrick or not, I had to think ‘What would I do in that scenario?’ That was a way to find those different routes from A to B. Traditionally movies rely on archetypes and archetypes have become so ingrained in storytelling that stories go on autopilot. My idea was to turn the autopilot off and let the characters act like real people.

The three main characters are very much connected even though they aren’t in many scenes together. That’s a sign of good writing.

DL: We thought about that. Casey [Affleck] and Rooney [Mara] were both doing movies prior to this and we didn’t have any rehearsal time. We shot all of Casey’s material first and then we had three days where it overlapped and we shot the scenes with him and Rooney together. The rest of the movie was Rooney and Ben [Foster]. We weren’t sure until halfway through the shoot what the chemistry would be like between Casey and Rooney. They’re both great actors, so at the very least they’d have some sort of chemistry. The first scene we shot was them in the truck waiting for the robbery to happen. The chemistry in that scene was so strong that we felt like we needed to add one more scene that wasn’t about crime but encapsulated the relationship. The chemistry was so electric.

Is it difficult to find funding for your films?

DL: It is. I don’t ever want to wait to find funding. I just want to make movies with the means I have at my disposal. I took some of the money that was for college and bought a camera and an editing system. That’s all I needed. I had the means, at that point, to make films. I remember my camera broke and I bought a digital camera and made handmade films. There’s so many things available now that make the excuses go away. A film like Ain’t Them Bodies Saints is on a bigger scale and I wouldn’t be able to make that movie for no money. Just because you don’t have any money doesn’t mean you can’t make an effective movie that’s communicating a clear point of view. When you have a clear point of view and you’re trying to say something about something through your work, that’s what people respond to. I feel by not waiting for money people to give me a check, by not waiting for the casts to show up, by just saying ‘I want to do this’, that gets the ball rolling. In the case of Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, I knew it was going to take some money to make it, and I was going to raise some money. I was going to raise $100,000 if I had to. I knew I couldn’t pay for it myself, but I said I would start shooting on October 21st, 2011. I set the start date and started looking for locations. By moving forward myself, other things started to fall into place. We certainly missed that start date, but 8 months after that we were shooting. It went from being something that had no backing or support to being a film that’s playing at SIFF. It all happened within a year and a half. I don’t expect it to ever be that easy again.

I was reading something Malcolm Gladwell wrote where he said people don’t give enough credit to hard work. For example, we think Lebron James is naturally talented but we dismiss how he spends his summers working on his skills.

DL: I think about that now. I want to go on a diet to get fit and all the magazines are covered with easy ways to do it [laughs]. There’s no way it’s going to be easy. For it to work, hard work has to occur. You mentioned Lebron James and nobody thinks about it being hard to play basketball at a high level and keep that up. There’s a degree of having to sustain it once you get there. I think it’s important for people to be aware of and get excited for.

Even with your film, the excitement leads to expectations.

DL: It’s very strange. I read the other day “The hype on Ain’t Them Bodies Saints has reached a deafening level.” That’s not good [laughs]. It’s a very small movie. It’s got an epic scope, but it’s a very intimate story. There’s nothing I can do about that. It got into Sundance and were lucky that happened. The trailer comes out and it’s a fair assessment of what the movie is. You can look at the trailer and think there’s more action, or it’s more poetic. That’s the nature of making things in the public sphere. People will form their own opinions and ideas before they see it. I certainly do it with every movie I see. You just have to hope for the best.

Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate..